Dynamically Attaching and Detaching Applications

When containers may not know the network to which they will be attached, Weave Net enables you to dynamically attach and detach containers to and from a given network, even when a container is already running.

To illustrate…

host1$ C=$(docker run -e WEAVE_CIDR=none -dti alpine:latest)
host1$ weave attach $C
10.2.1.3

where,

C=$(docker run -e WEAVE_CIDR=none -dti alpine:latest) starts a container and assigns its ID to a variable
weave attach – the Weave Net command to attach to the specified container
10.2.1.3 - the allocated IP address output by weave attach, in this case in the default subnet

Note If you are using the Weave Docker API proxy, it will have modified DOCKER_HOST to point to the proxy and therefore you will have to pass -e WEAVE_CIDR=none to start a container that doesn’t get automatically attached to the weave network for the purposes of this example.

If weave attach sees the container has a hostname with a domain-name, it will add those into WeaveDNS (unless you turn this off with the --without-dns argument).

host1$ docker run -dti --name=c1 --hostname=c1.weave.local alpine:latest
host1$ weave attach c1
10.32.0.1
host1$ weave dns-lookup c1
10.32.0.1

If you would like /etc/hosts to contain the Weave Net address (the same way the proxy does), specify --rewrite-hosts when running weave attach:

host1$ weave attach --rewrite-hosts c1

Dynamically Detaching Containers

A container can be detached from a subnet, by using the weave detach command:

host1$ weave detach $C
10.2.1.3

You can also detach a container from one network and then attach it to a different one:

host1$ weave detach net:default $C
10.2.1.3
host1$ weave attach net:10.2.2.0/24 $C
10.2.2.3

or, attach a container to multiple application networks, effectively sharing the same container between applications:

host1$ weave attach net:default
10.2.1.3
host1$ weave attach net:10.2.2.0/24
10.2.2.3

Finally, multiple addresses can be attached or detached using a single command:

host1$ weave attach net:default net:10.2.2.0/24 net:10.2.3.0/24 $C
10.2.1.3 10.2.2.3 10.2.3.1
host1$ weave detach net:default net:10.2.2.0/24 net:10.2.3.0/24 $C
10.2.1.3 10.2.2.3 10.2.3.1

Important! Any addresses that were dynamically attached will not be re-attached if the container restarts.

See Also

Adding and Removing Hosts Dynamically